It's quite nice, with nuggets of information that call out the reality of the rapidly changing face of internet penetration and where it is consumed. Mobility and geo-awareness are just two keys of that rapidly evolving landscape. Oracle is uniquely positioned to deliver unsurpassed value to enterprises the world over.

In this new world that is dominated by mobile devices, mobile Internet users will outnumber desktop Internet users by 2014. That's just over two years away. As the more than billion mobile users in countries like India and China move to Internet-enabled smartphones, this will bring about a tectonic shift in how analytics will be delivered to end-users.

Analytics is 80-90% about consumption of information. Rapid, speed-of-thought analysis, that Oracle Exalytics enables, delivered to users where they are, when they need it. Tablets are the evolution of notebooks - bringing mobility to information consumers.

Oracle BI EE keeps a close eye on the total cost of ownership of BI implementations for its customers. Design once, develop once, deploy anywhere, everywhere. The server takes care of the under-the-hood transformations needed to leverage the form factor and device where analytics is consumed.

The future promises to be exciting. Welcome to the new world of Oracle BI Mobile.

Do take a minute to read this disclaimer, since this pertains to future functionality.

The software consists of the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, the secret-sauce, so to say, that enables the in-memory capabilities of Exalytics. TimesTen is the market leading in-memory database solution. Exalytics is also tightly integrated with and can connect to an Oracle Exadata machine via Infiniband. The software foundation, of course, is the market leading analytics suite, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite (informally known as OBIEE).

This is Jacques Vigeant, currently my manager, demonstrating Exalytics in the session. Ultra industrial-scale Master-detail linking is just one of the ingredients here. Another of the features I wrote about and defined as a product manager. Others being advanced data visualizations, and mobile analytics. Feels good :-)

Geo-spatial visualizations in the Exalytics demo. Zoom into the Map View. This particular example shows store locations in the city of San Francisco. The map data has been provided by NAVTEQ.

You can add or remove formats from the Map View, with a mouse-click. Color-code by quartiles, quintiles, deciles, or any other arbitrary number of bins. Select from percentile binning, value binning, or even continuous fill bins. Choose variable shaped markers, or pie graph or bar graph overlays. Even use images as markers.

Monday, October 03, 2011

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.

The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

A new in-memory cache that is services by the TimesTen database. An adaptive cache algorithm that ensures that frequently accessed data is kept in-memory, thereby reducing or altogether eliminating Database hits.

The first screenshot above, in the top row, is that of Map Views - geo-spatial visualizations in the OBIEE 11g suite; the second is a new type of Scorecard visualization, known as the Strategy Wheel; the third is a screenshot from the BI Mobile app running an OBIEE Dashboard page; and the fourth is showcasing a new Trellis multi-panel visualization.

Enhancements and new capabilities in the Essbase MOLAP engine to take advantage of Exalytics.

Close to a BILLION records are analyzed. Prompts that refresh at the speed of thought. Search-as-you-type capabilities.

Microcharts, aka Sparklines, in their myriad forms: whether as sparkbars or sparklines, with highlighting of low and high values help visualize in an understandable manner massive amounts of data within the small confines of a single screen.

A close-up of a line graph souped up with master-detail linking.

Start at any level of aggregation.

Drill down any path, across the row or column edge of the view to drill to a deeper level of insight.

Each sparkline cell in the Trellis view is serving up tens even hundreds of data points. Multiply by a dozen rows and dozen or more columns and you are truly talking about meaningful dense data visualizations.

I need to have access to this same dashboard as I leave the office and bring out my iPad.

Adding this Dashboard as a Favorite means it is easier to access.

Like from my BI Mobile iPad app. With a consistent user-interface that is nonetheless optimized for a multi-touch gestural interface that is provided in the Apple iPad tablet.

More information, including a BI Mobile app demo in Balaji's general session.

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.

The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

H/W Scan rate of 200 Gigabytes per second (slide from Larry Ellison's keynote)

The industry's first in-memory BI machine

Best-in-class enterprise BI platform, in-memory analytics software, and hardware optimized to work together

Advanced data visualization and exploration to quickly provide actionable insight from large amounts of data

"The Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation running on Oracle Exalytics features a number of enhancements including mobile enablement of existing dashboards and reports, native look and feel, better interactivity support, ability to bookmark and save reports and dashboards for offline interactive viewing etc." (from the White Paper)

The Exalytics machine includes 40 processor cores and 1TB of DRAM, but can hold five to 10TB of data in memory thanks to compression, Ellison said.
It runs a software stack that includes parallelized versions of Oracle's TimesTen in-memory database, BI (business intelligence) stack and Essbase OLAP (online analytical processing) server, Ellison revealed.

“Everything runs faster if you keep it in DRAM -- if you keep it in main memory,” Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said in a keynote address at a conference in San Francisco tonight. “You ask more questions, you get better answers.”
The Exalytics Intelligence Machine Ellison introduced will run Oracle’s Times Ten and Essbase databases, both gained through past acquisitions, in its terabyte of main memory.

Friday, July 22, 2011

The latest version of the Sample App, for Oracle BI 11g 11.1.1.5.0, was made available for download from OTN today. As the thousands of people who have downloaded and used the Sample App would know, it is a great way to get introduced to Oracle BI and to see so many of its features in action. It also serves as an excellent tutorial of sorts, since in so many areas the Sample App makes the fullest use of the product's amazing capabilities. Since some of these features, expectedly, require a person to possess a fair amount of relevant BI and Oracle BI skills, the available examples in the Sample App serve as a useful how-to, thus saving time for the person implementing or using the product.

As a disclaimer, please do take note of the following:Disclaimer: The SampleApp contents and its code are distributed free for demonstrative purposes only. It is neither maintained nor supported by Oracle as a licensed product.

These are short videos that showcase some of the capabilities in our mobile app. One focuses on the Oracle BI platform, while the other showcases what is possible with the mobile app accessing Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, like Financial Analytics.